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In this room a Scribe of to-day, humblest in Israel, yet with the gift of vision, stood turning over the few old books that lay about, strange flotsam and jetsam of the great world-currents that have drifted Israel to and fro.
It does not rise with the moist Hyades, or ride with cloudy Orion in the Mediterranean night; it does not pass like Atlantic tempests on great world-currents: it remains.
Her great misfortune was to enter the world-currents only on the material plane; to find her poor little peasant-bandit-souled self mistress of the world and its money, and still provincial to the core and with no ideas of bigness that were not of the earth earthy; with nothing whatever that was both spiritual and Roman to thrill to life the higher side of her; a multimillionaire that could hardly read or write, and knew no means of spending her money that was not essentially vulgar.
He is a great democrat, but, first and last and over all, he is a great man, a great nature, and deep world-currents course through him. He is distinctively an American poet, but his Americanism is only the door through which he enters upon the universal. Call his work poetry or prose, or what you will: that it is an inspired utterance of some sort, any competent person ought to be able to see.
The result of this Spanish conquest was that the Pax Romana came into Spain, bringing with it severa centuries of high prosperity; the world-currents flowed in there at once and presently the light of Spain, such as it was at that time, shone out over the Roman world. Most of the great names of the first century A.D. are those of Spaniards.
Is this, possibly, the explanation: that the ancestors of the Chinese, a colony from Atlantis some time perhaps long before the Atlantean degeneration and fall, were held under major pralaya apart from the world-currents for hundreds of thousands of years, until some time later than 160,000 years ago the time of the beginning our our sub-race?
We must look for the origins of Whitman, I think, in the deep world-currents that have been shaping the destinies of the race for the past hundred years or more; in the universal loosening, freeing, and removing obstructions; in the emancipation of the people, and their coming forward and taking possession of the world in their own right; in the triumph of democracy and of science; the downfall of kingcraft and priestcraft; the growth of individualism and non-conformity; the increasing disgust of the soul of man with forms and ceremonies; the sentiment of realism and positivism, the religious hunger that flees the churches; the growing conviction that life, that nature, are not failures, that the universe is good, that man is clean and divine inside and out, that God is immanent in nature, all these things and more lie back of Whitman, and hold a causal relation to him.
All through the long West-Asian pralaya, West-Asian includes Egyptian, the seeds of the Esoteric Wisdom remained in those parts; they lacked vitalization, because the world-currents were not playing there then; but they survived in Egypt from the Egyptian Mysteries of old; and as in India you might have found men who knew about them, but not how to use them for the uplifting of the world, so doubtless you should have found such men in Egypt during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.
It was the first thing he had done for a long, long time that was romantic and unconsidered and actual. And it appeared that, after all, he wasn't needed. Concentration on the nuances of minor fifteenth-century poets had unfitted him for being swept on, as these had been, by the world-currents.